Aladdin (/u/RealtechPostBot) is a simple bot I made to combat how /r/technology has became a highly political, repetitive, and somewhat circlejerky subreddit.

Aladdin scans the top 100 posts from /r/technology, calculates a simple keyword-based score, and reposts submissions whose score is below a certain threshold to /r/realtech. The system is crude but very effective, eliminating most undesirable posts and leaving behind many posts that are usually buried by /r/technology's subscribers.

The bot currently scrapes the "top" page of /r/technology once every ten minutes.

Accidentally mirrored spam, non-news, and other irrelevant content is removed manually. WSJ posts automatically get a comment with a paywall bypass link (feature removed due to WSJ disabling Google cache), all posts get a comment with a link to the original /r/technology thread. Content that ends up in the spam filter usually stays in the spam filter (it's usually from site-wide banned domains that /r/technology for some reason approves). A simple additional additional spam filter is used by the bot to filter out posts that /r/technology's moderators/spam filter didn't catch. Multiple posts with similar titles are filtered out via a string comparison filter function, which mostly eliminates the flood of articles that follow major news announcements.

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Quick Summary:

Given that “encrypting” the backup configuration files is done presumably to protect end users, expecting this to thwart any attacker and touting it as a product feature is unforgivable.

Perusing the release notes for the latest Linksys WRT120N firmware, one of the more interesting comments reads: Having previously reversed their firmware obfuscation and patched their code to re-enable JTAG debugging, I thought that surely I would be able to use this access to reverse the new encryption algorithm used to secure their backup configuration files.

I’m just disappointed that it took longer to write this blog post than it did to break their “crypto”.

Here’s a diff of two backup configuration files from the WRT120N. The only change made between backups was that the administrator password was changed from “admin” in backup_config_1.bin to “aa” in backup_config_2.bin: Two things to note here: I immediately suspected some sort of simple single-byte XOR encryption.

Boy was I giving them way too much credit.

Disclaimer:this summary is not guaranteed to be accurate, correct or even news.